Pascal Mercier - Perlmann's Silence

The last incongruity occurred to me only the next morning when I was shaving: how did Lufthansa know my home address, when it was my work address that was on the text? No one in Germany knows where I live. (Apart from you, of course.) That ran through my head again and again over the course of the day, and struck me as the one insoluble mystery. Of course, there’s the possibility of an envelope with the home address on it. But there’s something artificial about that (another deus ex machina!). And besides, wouldn’t they have sent that portentous envelope as well? That’s what I would have done. An open envelope in someone’s hands doesn’t necessarily mean that that person is also the addressee. And if someone receives a nameless text, he’s more likely to make sense of things if an envelope addressed to him arrives with it, than if there are no clues at all. (If he hasn’t just fished it out of a waste-paper basket, the current owner of the envelope will be one of the acquaintances of the addressee, and the author of the text will eventually be found among them.)

Whatever. The more natural story, I finally and reluctantly admitted, is that I didn’t write my work address on it at all: if my memory deceives me over the question of whether I took the text out of my case – why couldn’t it deceive me here, too? Contrary to my usual habit, I wrote my private address on it, simple as that. It unsettles me to find that I plainly can’t rely on my memory. That used not to be the case. An experience which, of course, fits Gorky’s subject and my thesis (even though that connection, as you know, is more complicated than it might superficially appear). If the experience were not so awkward…

In spite of all these explanations: a hint of strangeness, of mystery, still remains. As if a drama had been played out around this text, of which its actors have no notion… If that had happened to Gorky – he would have made something of it!

What happened outside the world during the six days that followed – I haven’t the faintest idea. I can’t even remember the weather. I was typing things out, filling gaps, going on typing, reconstructing the next missing thought, and so on. As long as I hadn’t finished the day’s workload, I simply didn’t stop, regardless of how late it was getting and how much my back hurt. The tension was so great that I even brought myself to ask a hated neighbor to do some food shopping for me. (She couldn’t believe her ears. Since then our relationship has been excellent!)

Between Wednesday night and Friday morning I rewrote the lost conclusion. The text isn’t nearly as good as the original one. In fact, it’s even rather shoddy. Somehow I was so exhausted that I couldn’t really keep my thoughts together. And temporarily I felt as if my earlier impression of having found a coherent solution for the problem of appropriation was pure delusion, a Fata Morgana. I didn’t go to bed. I just dozed for half an hour on the sofa every now and again. I think there are a few typing errors. But shortly after eight on Friday morning the thing was finished.

I walked slowly through a thick, fairy-tale snowstorm to the institute, and made several copies there. I savored the moment when I laid the manuscript on the table in front of the Chair of the Commission. He had given up expecting it, and you could see that he was distressed. I could swear that he had already made promises to someone else (I don’t know to whom) which he would now have to revoke. I think he really hated me at that moment.

All that weekend I just slept, ate, slept. The Commission’s meeting, I discovered later, was that Monday morning, and the decision was to be made at around midday: they simply couldn’t do anything other than give me the post. (Of course, in that short time no one had read the text. Once again they were concerned only with externals such as length.) But they kept me waiting. No one informed me. Then, when I called on them yesterday, I was informed of the result in an insultingly casual manner. And I also discovered that the conditions for the post are worse than expected. Still, though, it’s a permanent post, so I can breathe for the first time. I would have liked to celebrate with someone: but the only possible person would have been Yuri (the one with the fifty dollars) and he wasn’t there. I tried to call you, but those endlessly engaged phone lines are hopeless, so I started this letter, which I had to interrupt because my exhaustion caught up with me.

I think a lot about that wonderful week with you all. I will send you a copy of the text under separate cover. (You will probably be annoyed if I say this, but still: I don’t think it will be too difficult for you.) I would really like to send all the other colleagues a copy – so that they can see that this portentous text really exists! Because it’s a nightmare typical of our profession: being invited to give a lecture somewhere – and you have no text! How easy it is to feel that the others think you’re a fraud! But perhaps it will end up being translated and published. Can you envisage that any more clearly now?

I hope to hear from you soon. You struck us all as seriously exhausted, and I hope you will soon recover. I felt that you didn’t want us to mention Agnes, so I just want to assure you that there was a lot of sympathy for your difficult situation in the group.

And let me add one thing in conclusion: even when you were here, I had the feeling I had a friend in you. After my week with you I am now sure of it. You showed an interest in my work that no one has ever shown before. And the way you were interested in Klim Samgin showed me that we have much else in common. I don’t need to stress how much I look forward to seeing you again soon.

That last paragraph brought tears to Perlmann’s eyes once more. But now they were no longer tears of relief, but of shame, and he hid his face in the cushion. When he went to the bathroom afterwards, to wash his tear-drenched face, he felt a weight lifting from him, one so powerful that he had had to turn his emotions away from it all the time, to be able to bear it at all. He lay down, exhausted, on the sofa, and after a while he read the letter again.

The worst passages, he found, were the ones about the prison and the parenthetical remark about Perlmann’s knowledge of his private address. Then came the passage about the drama and the unknown actors, and it was also unbearable that Leskov, because he had no one to celebrate with, had tried to call him – him, of all people, when he had been a hair’s breadth away from murdering him. Only in the course of the day did Perlmann manage to smile about one passage or an other, which he read several times, and it was always an endangered smile that didn’t dare to go too far for fear of subsiding into tears once more. When evening began to fall, he went to the piano and played the Nocturne in D flat major. Blind with tears, he kept hitting wrong notes.

In mid-December Perlmann went to Hamburg to see Hanna Liebig. Her golden hair had developed a silvery sheen, and under the dark strand that she combed emphatically over her forehead there was a long scar, which, as she said with embarrassment, was the result of a car accident. She was still energetic. But there was, he thought, something washed-out and disappointed in her face. He liked her apartment, but an overly ornate clock and some ceramic knick-knacks bothered him, because they struck him as whimsical – as if they were signs that Hanna’s finely honed sense of elegant design was deserting her.

Over dinner he told her about the research group, about Millar and their rivalry. He also mentioned that he had played the A flat minor Polonaise. Afterwards she had some idea of why he had phoned her. But without the tunnel, the fear and the despair the whole thing sounded hollow and childish. When she ran her hand playfully over his hair on the way to the kitchen, as she had done in the past, he was about to start over from the beginning and tell her the whole story. But something in her face, something new that he couldn’t have described, seemed strange to him, and then the feeling was over. They talked again for a while about Liszt, but it was mere shop talk, which soon bored him, because it had no connection with Millar and the ochre-colored armchairs in the lounge. Afterwards in the street he reflected that they had been closer to one another recently on the phone than during the whole of their meeting that evening.